Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday July 03, 2010 @12:35PM
from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

necro81 writes "Researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a smartphone app that allows users to measure how poor their vision is (myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism) and receive a corrective prescription. The user peers through a $2 optical adapter at the screen of a smartphone. The app displays lighted bars, and prompts the user to adjust the display until the bars line up. Repeating this with bars in different locations and orientations allows the vision distortion to be determined to within about 0.4 diopters using a Nexus One. The iPhone 4, with its higher-resolution display, should be able to improve that to 0.28 diopters. This could have broad application in the developing world, where experienced opticians and diagnostic equipment are hard to come by."

This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?

Exactly. I suspect there are far more phones in those areas than expensive optician sets. Despite the lack of cell coverage. Besides, it doesn't have to be a smartphone. This idea and application can be integrated into a lot of other equipment, such as the inexpensive laptops being deployed to the local schools or local clinics.

I also see a marketing opportunity here. Sell the viewfinder for $10 online and then have a website with the application (possible with a subscription fee).

It's great in general, not just for developing countries. Eyeglass centers could reduce the number of full tests, only doing a high precision test when a user's score drifts too far.

Also neat was the stuff with the pinhole cameras that use computer aided recognition on the smartphone to count T-cells or whatever else they could make that apparatus do, maybe indicate staph from a throat swab.

Could spawn a whole new generation of medical accessories for smartphones/PCs. Could also spawn a whole new generati

http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/dacca/ [seeingisbelieving.ca]
It does not address your large screen smart phone entry but a single cell phone can be the next step up in communication and technology for a community. However, If the community sees an advantage of getting a single smart phone with screen with useful applications then the health of the community will increase, meaning less days sick, unable to see, etc.

This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?

The point is that they developed a new method of measuring visual impairment. The fact that they used a cell phone LCD screen is irrelevant. They would have used the cheapest possible method for attaching a programmable LCD display to their apparatus. This time it just happened to be a Nexus One (According to TFA, they never actually tried the iPhone).

I'd like an app like that for Linux so people can test their vision at home, multiple times, and optimize prescriptions for different distances (for example, close work like soldering).

With the availability of an eye test app, people who know their eye health is good can refine their prescription cheaply (buying online instead of getting ass-raped for the same lens/frame combo locally) and save playing eye test/prescription/purchase roulette.

Here in the developed world, this $2 device will cost $1000, because it will be classified as a medical device and thus require lots of testing to satisfy the FDA, and kickbacks to keep the opticians from trying to ban it due to it stealing their jobs.

Here in the developed world, this $2 device will cost $1000, because it will be classified as a medical device and thus require lots of testing to satisfy the FDA, and kickbacks to keep the opticians from trying to ban it due to it stealing their jobs.

Unfortunately here in the US this would require a change to the law the healthcare industry bought that says you can't buy contacts or prescription glasses without a recent (within one year) prescription from an optometrist. Both contacts and prescription eyeglasses are classified as "medical devices".

I've had the *exact* same prescription for 15 years (I have the slightest astigmatism in my right eye, I only glasses for coding to avoid eye strain). If I lose or break my glasses, I can't just go get another

"Unfortunately here in the US this would require a change to the law the healthcare industry bought that says you can't buy contacts or prescription glasses without a recent (within one year) prescription from an optometrist. Both contacts and prescription eyeglasses are classified as "medical devices"... It's quite a racket."

Fuck the law, just buy online and lie about the prescription. I'll lie to anyone who obstructs me for no good reason. I don't owe human obstacles anything. They can cram their scam whe

Well, I can see why there would be regulation on the manufacture and labeling of medical oxygen, since it needs to be fit for purpose and the reading on the pressure gauge being right could be a matter of life or death if somebody doesn't bring enough with them.

However, I agree completely that regulating the SALE of medical oxygen is just crazy.

Frankly, I don't think there should be any need to regulate the sale of any drug or medical device, with the exception of those that could cause disproportionate har

Now, considering you can fax them the prescription rather than providing them with your optometrist's contact info, a little work with a scanner and a graphics package would prob do the trick... but it's still not legal.

what does legality have to do with anything? seriously, who cares if its legal?

My idea of legitimate is delivering the product I purchased in accord with the description and without tricks or low quality.

Any of the first ten results on google fit that bill. Hell of them are in US. Yes they require you to have a script, says so right on the page. But they don't require you prove it via contact info or fax, the only 'proof' required is to input it.

The U.S. has a serious need to fix the laws surrounding medical care anyway. Mandatory insurance is just an insult, as if making it mandatory somehow magically makes it affordable.

One recent legal-medical atrocity was Colchicine. The drug was grandfathered in and so never had to have FDA approval and that apparently ticked them off mightily. In spite of centuries of safe use, the FDA granted a single company exclucivity in exchange for an abbreviated set of studies aimed primarily at stroking egos at the F

Healthcare costs are jacked through the roof, in part, because the healthcare industry knows the insurance industry will pay for it. They effectively charge the most the insurance company will pay. No insurance? Unless you're dealing with a doctor/practice with some part of their soul left intact, you pretty much can't afford it.

My dentist, for example, offers a "cash discount". Translation: We can't hammer an insurance company so we'll just charge you what it shoul

My dentist, for example, offers a "cash discount". Translation: We can't hammer an insurance company so we'll just charge you what it should cost in the first place.

Even that price is outrageous, but it's not the Dentist's fault. He has to charge that much because he has to pay outrageous prices for equipment and supplies. Replace a few $10,000 and $100,000 pieces of equipment with $100 an $1000 pieces of equipment and suddenly he can charge you a lot less on the cash discount plan.

Sudden changes to your vision may be a sign of serious condition, and a visit to a medical professional is in order.

By that argument, Dr. Scholl's inserts should be prescription only since foot pain could be a sign of a much more serious degenerative bone disease. Sure, they'll suddenly cost more than the shoes they get inserted into and as a result, millions of people will suffer needless extra foot pain (and remain undiagnosed for their more serious degenerative disease), but what the heck, money is no object (to the people passing the laws).

How about just including a card on the device that says "Sudden changes to you

Yup - by forcing people to see an eye doctor to get updated glasses, we're not giving them an opportunity to catch some serious health problem like retinopathy. Instead we're giving them the opportunity to get in a car crash as they just try to get by with blurry vision that could be fixed by spending $20 on glasses.

Medicine is filled with these kinds of false dichotomies. Preventing somebody from getting care doesn't mean that they'll line up to pay a specialist $200 to fix their ails. Instead it just m

While HMO plans are a choice people should be able to make, you should look into actual high deductible insurance. Our family of 6 pays $500/mo with a $5500/yr deductible. We pay "out of pocket" by depositing the money into a Health Savings Account (HSA) first, and paying from that. This deducts the expense on the same line as IRA contributions. Fully funding the HSA for the deductible, plus the premiums, is about the cost of HMO coverage with the same exclusions and tax benefits. BUT, if we don't sp

When I was running my own business and paying out of pocket I did exactly that, carried a $5k/year deductible.

My point, however, was that we're rapidly trending toward that as the norm even with group plans as our healthcare costs spiral out of control.

When you're billed $15k to fix a compound fracture and your insurance is 80/20 up to $X... you're right there. I believe the watered down "reform" even guarantees that, putting yearly out-of-pocket maxes right around that level in the "basic" package which s

Not only is it great for developing countries. It's great for those of us in countries like the USA, Canada, Easter Europe, and many other places. Health care costs are increasing. It's about time we came up with some ways to make health care cheaper. My province spends half of it's revenue on health care. I would love for them to start using ideas like this to make it possible for lower skilled people who demand less money to give medical care in simple cases such as prescribing glasses, so that doctor's have more time for real important stuff and also so that health care costs would go down. With all the advancements in science it seems that health care is just getting more and more expensive. Really, we should be using those advancements to make it cheap and accessible to all.

But I'm sure your smartphone taking your prescription, uploading the data to your Google Health account, and having Costco/Walmart make the glasses at their facility and overnight them to you isn't as far off as you'd think.

But in the US, eye tests aren't expensive. Health insurance does not cover corrective optics normally. Yo either have to get separate insurance, or pay yourself. The cost of the separate insurance generally works out to the same cost you'd pay yourself, just spread out. The most expensive you usually see is around $100 and that's at a private optician's office and is usually quite a comprehensive test. $50 is not that hard to find at chain locations.

Yes, but many of these people won't get checked out for retinopathy. Instead they'll just suffer with blurry vision. There is no reason that a prescription shouldn't be free and eyeglasses shouldn't be $15 at Walmart. A machine can do the former just fine, and the latter is just some metal and plastic. Sure, it won't be as good as what we currently spend $200 on, but does it have to be? Nobody is saying that we need to prevent doctors from offering the $200 exam to those who need it.

How cost effective is this? Sure it's only a $2 adapter, but then you need a $400-$700 phone to attach it to (that's the actual price of the hardware mentioned, when not subsidized by a long term monthly contract, which costs even more).
Surely for $400 someone could build a standalone vision testing device that is more accurate?

Oh trust me, in this case it isn't the insurance companies causing the problem. Most of them don't even cover eye glasses anyway, and if people didn't need eye exams that would mean that they wouldn't be paying for them. The insurance company would probably be happy to pay Walmart to have one of these devices in every store in America.

In this case the rent-seekers are the ophthalmologists.

NPR had a good 2-part series on health care costs. A doctor said that he was asked how bad a patient's vision should

Give the proper low-power laser emitter and electronics, you could probably not only replace an auto-refractor (the device you look through to see an image go from blurry to clear; it's using infrared to determine your prescription, which the optometrist uses to double-check his work) but also the Wavefront system:

A sole traveling, untrained, non-optometrist Peace Corps kid with a box of donated used glasses could bring a box of glasses.

You almost had it there. You did (almost) stumble blindly on it (no pun intended), but still...

1 - Based on the "Developing countries can't be choosers" axiom, it is not really THAT important to people living there if the eyeglasses really fit their prescription 100%.Particularly, if the glasses are free.

2 - Based on 1, there is a much simpler way of testing for the right prescription under those conditions (choosers not too picky, choice rather limited anyway...).It consists of the "patient" trying out several sets of glasses until he/she finds the one that works for him/her.You know, like you would with a pair of sunglasses.

And, based on my own day-to-day observation from what you might call a "developing nation" (Bosnia) that model works perfectly well even for the paying customers.E.g. people who can't really afford money to visit a private optometrist or they lack time or health insurance for a visit to a government one.All of those cases mostly resulting from the case of being employed "off the books".

Only thing is... There is really no need for donated eyeglasses cause Chinese ones are dirt cheap.Like, plastic sunglasses prices. Often sold side by side on the same stand.

Sure, if you have a rather specific need (different prescription for each eye, or a relatively rare case of visual impairment) you are probably not gonna find what you are looking for "over the counter".Then again, chances of finding EXACTLY what you need in a "box of donated used glasses" with or without an eyePhone (Get it? EYE-PHONE!) are far lower than that.

Oh... and one more thing.While there are plenty enough iPhones here (just today I saw one "barely used" 3G 16GB being sold for ~320$) - ALL of them are jailbroken.Also, you can forget using the app store directly from it even if you have somehow gotten your hands on an actual "virgin" iPhone.Cause even if your iPhone is perfectly legal, with no cracking/jailbreaking attached - your money is no good. [economist.com]So, that "non-optometrist Peace Corps kid" should better get all his app-needs before going on his "mission of mercy".If any of those apps need to "call home", well... sucks to be him in the "developing world".

Again, this is one of those inventions that are pitched by people who have either never been outside of a developed "1st world" country, OR who have only ever been to some village in the middle of the African jungle so they base their understanding of every "developing country" on that one experience or on what they see on CNN. Or in the movies.Invention is then being pitched as intended for developing countries - where in reality there is no demand or need for it.On the other hand, hypochondriacs and "I_am_my_own_wikipedia-diagnostician"-people will probably love it.

I don't want to be an argument killer, but if you had read the article and saw the names and descriptions of the group members, you'd have seen that the main developers of this project are two Indians and two Brazilians, so my guess is that they have been to a lot more than a single village in the middle of the African jungle (well, maybe not in Africa, but in India and Brazil), and that they do have a, shall we say, decent grip on the resource limitations of the developing world.
But then again I might be

There's at least two sides to that: (1) the glasses mentioned in your link have limited application where the wearer has comparatively complex issues such as astigmatism, and (2) many glasses donation programs have been shut down. I recently attempted to offload a few pairs of old-prescription glasses here in Western Australia, only to be informed that such programs were now regarded as counter-productive at best. As a result, they ended up in the bin. I can actuall

What is the expense of those self correcting glasses? You can make basic non-adjusting glasses extremely cheap if you're willing to. I'm willing to bet that those 'self adjusting' ones are a lot more expensive per set.What is the durability?

With the app and a good smartphone, it sounds like a volunteer would be able to get an actual prescription out of the screening, perhaps so far as to simply pull the common prescription out of a box($2 lens going into a predetermined frame) vs a $100 adjust

The current cost for a single pair of adjustable glasses is approximately $19. With increased mass production and emerging technology enabling delivery by anyone with minimal training, the cost per unit will significantly decrease.

So premade glasses and the smartphone app would be cheaper currently, but if the technology becomes popular, this may be cheaper.

I suspect that the cost of optical equipment required to reach the level of accuracy and durability of this app, the phone, and its $2 adapter, is much less than the professional equipment opticians currently use.

My droid has a nice camera but you wouldn't expect a professional photographer to use one as his primary tool. I suspect this scenario is similar.

I doubt it. Opticians are using equipment right out of the 50's and the accuracy is based on your subjective feedback.

There is automated equipment that shines light into the eye and measures its response while flipping lenses (they use this for prescriptions in the military). This works but it is arguably less accurate than the manual system.

delicate equipment? You mean that big heavy metal contraption built on 1950s precision technology that has levers and lets a doctor manually flip lenses while he repeatedly asks "better or worse" and then "better or just smaller" ones he homes in?

They can do the same thing with a box full of lenses at different strengths.

It's not even CLOSE to trivial to bring in expensive and bulky equipment to the third world.

I live and volunteer in Honduras, and when one of the projects I work with needs something, one of the primary constraints is how do we get it here. Any piece of equipment that can do the same job and can be brought in with airline luggage will ALWAYS be preferable to something that have to be shipped.

A couple of examples: Someone was kind enough to donate 20 complete new computes (monitor, keyboard etc) to one